Erie looks to Cincinnati as model for its downtown revitalization

Sunday

The efforts and dollars of Cincinnati's business community have transformed the troubled Over-the-Rhine neighborhood into a community on the rise. Erie hopes to follow their lead.

CINCINNATI, OHIO — Jennifer Williams had a simple wish list when she went shopping for a new neighborhood in a new city.

“I wanted to walk to work,” she said. “I wanted to walk to get food, coffee, all of it.”

Williams found what she was looking for in Cincinnati’s historic Over-the-Rhine neighborhood.

The Erie Downtown Development Corp., a group led by Erie Insurance CEO Tim NeCastro, has been looking for a way to revitalize downtown Erie, and it is eager to roll out the welcome mat to people like Williams who are searching for an urban lifestyle.

NeCastro imagines a downtown Erie where someone like Williams might like to live. And he wouldn't mind creating a place to live for some of the 1,200 new employees who are expected to move into the $135 million Erie Insurance office building now under construction.

Looking for inspiration and advice, NeCastro and the EDDC turned several months ago to the Cincinnati Center City Development Corp.

What's this group's claim to fame?

It has turned Over-the-Rhine, a crumbling inner city neighborhood with a soaring crime rate and more than 500 vacant buildings, into a place that Williams and thousands of others have decided to call home.

Since 2004, the group known as 3CDC has been using money from big companies — including Kroger, Proctor & Gamble and Cintas — to invest in the surrounding community. In Erie, the EDDC has been working for a few months now to assemble an investment fund to begin buying and renovating properties in downtown Erie.

The EDDC will be following Cincinnati's model, where companies pool their money to make investments. Under their model, the management company buys property, renovates buildings, sells condominiums and rents first-floor retail and commercial space.

Williams, who was walking her dog in the newly renovated Ziegler Park Tuesday, rents an apartment in a neighborhood of three- and four-story brick buildings, many of them built by German immigrants in the mid-19th century.

It is a community that remains a work in progress. There are signs of change on almost every block as crews renovate brick buildings before gravity and neglect can claim them.

The result is a neighborhood filled with oyster bars and pubs, hot dog shops and a place that serves platefuls of Belgium waffles and fried chicken.

In an industry famous for failure, just one in 27 Over-the-Rhine restaurants has closed its doors, said Joe Rudemiller, spokesman for 3CDC. Much of what’s changed here has happened one building, or a storefront or two, at a time.

Some of the splashes have been bigger.

Just last week, 3CDC cut the ribbon on one of its biggest projects to date, a $143 million renovation of the 139-year-old Hall of Music.

And there’s more to come.

A $16 million project that is expected to begin in December will transform five old buildings into 50 affordable housing units with commercial space available on the first floor.

Meanwhile, work is expected to begin in 2018 on a $100 million apartment building and parking garage.

It wasn’t always like this.

Rudemiller, who grew up in the suburbs of Cincinnati, walked proudly through the streets of Over-the-Rhine last week, pointing out the new pool at Ziegler Park, the freshly painted storefronts of Vine Street, the transformation of Taft’s Ale House on Race Street. A church when it was built in the 1850s, it's now a gleaming new brewpub named for the nation's 27th president, Cincinnati native William Howard Taft.

Rudemiller, who graduated from college in 2006, admits he wasn’t allowed to venture to this part of town as a kid. Then again, there wasn't much reason to, he said.

Local observers say Over-the-Rhine scraped bottom in 2001 during a period of civil unrest that grew out of the police shooting of an unarmed black citizen.

Back then, the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, some 80 square blocks, was mostly abandoned, said Ozie Davis, a longtime community activist and a Democratic candidate for Cincinnati City Council.

"It was in bad, bad shape," he said. “The violence and the drug dealing were out of hand."

Then came the riots, the burned buildings.

"People were getting yanked out of their cars and beaten up," he said.

The neighborhood hit rock bottom and did it in conspicuous fashion during the riots, Davis said. Those dark days might have been the catalyst Cincinnati's business community needed to decide that enough was enough, he said.

Working together, big companies — led by Proctor & Gamble and Kroger — began making investments that continue to this day. More than $1.1 billion has been leveraged to restore 160 buildings and build 52 more. Meanwhile, crime in the neighborhood has declined by half, while the population of Cincinnati's urban core, which includes Over-the-Rhine, grew 11 percent in 2016.

Here's how a June 2016 article in Politico sized up the changes:

"It’s a transformation that happened in the blink of an eye, turning a neighborhood that in 2009 topped Compton in Los Angeles for the most dangerous into something that looks and feels like Greenwich Village. And it didn’t happen by accident."

Steve Leeper, a Pittsburgh native who helped develop the two new stadiums in the years he worked there, is generally considered the chief architect of the neighborhood’s rebirth.

Leeper was recruited to become 3CDC’s CEO in 2004 and today leads an organization with 70 employees that not only has used corporate money to renovate large sections of downtown Cincinnati, but is charged with providing free programs in a handful of parks and venues managed by 3CDC.

That means hosting literally hundreds of events each year, the majority of them free.

Last week’s events included something called Architects of Air, an exhibit that encourages visitors to walk through balloon sculptures. This week, residents of the Queen City can try their hand at free Pilates classes.

Whether it's salsa classes or weekly bluegrass or soul music concerts, corporate investors aren't making any money from all these free events.

"We think the intangible benefits provided from having active, vibrant civic spaces outweigh the financial losses we might incur," Rudemiller said. "Keeping the spaces active not only provides a great amenity for the community, it makes for a safer community."

Organizers in Erie say they've been inspired by Cincinnati's example.

"We were blown away," NeCastro said of a visit to Cincinnati. "We were intrigued as we walked around and imagined what it was like before. It was block after block of renovation. They weren’t all opulent properties, but they are well integrated areas, lots of people walking around, all kinds of mixed uses, storefronts with offices upstairs and more development going on."

Anyone driving through Cincinnati is reminded that Erie is a different place. At 298,000 people, Cincinnati is three times Erie's size. And with its hilly terrain and bridges crossing the Ohio River, Cincinnati feels far more like Pittsburgh than Erie.

Yet Erie and Cincinnati have something in common. Or at least they used to, Leeper said.

It is that tendency for self-deprecation, the habit of making a joke about yourself before someone else does.

Leeper used to hear it in Pittsburgh and it was common when he arrived in Cincinnati.

If the perception has changed, it seems likely it's because the reality has changed.

There are lively debates in Cincinnati about whether some parts of the community got left behind in the redevelopment of Over-the-Rhine.

But no one was complaining late Tuesday afternoon in Washington Park, which just a few years ago was a vast expanse of crumbling pavement. A group of girls giggled on the playground equipment as parents led small children toward the Architects of Air display.

And all seemed well with the world Wednesday for the patrons of Senate, an upscale hot dog shop and brew pub on Vine Street.

In what was once a burned-out, all-but abandoned street in a crumbling part of town, patrons were sitting down to $10 hot dogs, crispy pig tails and braised duck legs.

Leeper has no trouble remembering how things used to be.

"It was Fort Apache the Bronx," he said in a reference to the 1981 movie about a policeman in a neighborhood ravaged by crime and drugs.

"I think the city feels a lot better and I think its corporate leaders feel much better about this city," Leeper said. "I think we used to be our own worst enemy. People are taking pride and feeling good about this place. It’s taken us a long time to get here."

An older man walking up Vine Street on Wednesday, who asked that his name not be used, said, "This place reminds me of a memory I don't even really have. It reminds of what people told me this place used to be like."

Members of the EDDC are not the first who have looked to Leeper and his team for advice to make their own towns a bit more like they used to be.

Their story has been drawing national attention and city leaders from across the country have been looking to 3CDC for assistance.

Although he spent the first two-thirds of his life living a little over two hours away, Leeper doesn’t claim to know Erie well.

"But I can tell you from my discussions with them, they are in it for the right reasons," he said. "Of all the communities I have talked to, you guys seem to have progressed faster than most."

Does he have advice for Erie as it attempts to use its own corporate dollars to revive its own downtown?